Even in the magnanimous world of European
counter-culture, Italian music has a reputation for being self-indulgent and
melodramatic. The ‘alternative’ scene is uninspiring and derivative, confined
largely to copycat
indie bands and ‘new rave’ outfits, while in the electronic music the
nation has been unable to offer anything other than some lacklustre
variations on Brazilian house (slightly less samba, slightly more zampogna).
Punk and hardcore have been more successful, with groups like CCCP
and Marlene
Kuntz holding their own on the international circuit, while folk, particularly
‘classic’ artists
like Fabrizio de Andre’, are most appreciated at home.

Yet there is one popular genre that has
thrived more than any other. The Italian rap scene is among the most creative
and provocative in Europe, led
by a close community of DJs and MCs who – in contrast to the apolitical celebrity
figureheads – overwhelmingly dedicate their lyrics towards social and political
issues. An overview of this history is impossible, but in this short introduction
I want to emphasise the overwhelming public
concern of the most well-known artists and the culture that sustains them. In
doing so I also hope to offer a modest defence of Italian pop music and, more
generally, offer some suggestions on the
role hip-hop can play in political life.

Corruption
and the mafia state

The boom in Italian hip-hop culture, and the
birth of its unique social imagination, can be traced to its emergence as a popular
form of opposition to Berlusconi’s government in the early 90s. While the experiments
of the underground scene (Raptus,
Radical
Stuff, Camelz
Finnezza Click) pre-date this moment by almost a decade, it was in the
shadow of Il Cavaliere that the genre really took off and became recognisably
embedded in larger social struggles. Rap, as something immediate, democratic
and cheap to produce, became a vehicle through which the decadence of the new
elite could be labeled and challenged by the Italian people.

The first wave, now
sometimes referred to as the ‘golden age’, was centred around a small group
of artists who performed in Milan in various low-end venues. Some, of these, such as Articolo31,
went on to red carpet fame and made a major impact on the pop world. At the
time the most well-known of these, and perhaps the one who emerged from these
years with the most respect, was Frankie
Hi NRG, an MC whose lyrics predominantly deal with political and social
issues. His anti-government anthem ‘Fight da faida’ [‘fight the profit’] has
become folklore for a certain generation of Italians, a symbol of a country ruled
by the mafia where nobody plays by the rules.

The track was first
released in 1991 with a backing track heavily indebted to the Beastie Boys
and Cyprus Hill. The above ‘hardcore’ version was released three years later,
following the
assassination of Giovanni Falcone, the anti-mafia judge by Cosa Nostra. The
lyrics are stark and pull few punches: the Italian people are described as “cannon
fodder” caught in a war “between the mafia and camorra / Sodom and Gomorrah”
while Naples and Palermo are transfigured into “two branches of hell”. The rant,
though, is not confined to these two symbols of social decay and the main power
of the track is its emphasis on institutional infection: “Today Vito Corleone
is much closer. He’s sitting in Parliament”. It was the year of Berluconi’s
first election victory and the lyrics of this re-release resonated even more
than the first time around.

While Frankie was hitting the mainstream
with his earnest finger pointing the underground scene was exploding with a
more nihilistic anger, and crews like Colle
der Fomento and Sacre
Scuole (the early Club
Dogo) began to write rhymes about obscene wealth in more satirical terms.
Perhaps the most talented of these groups was the little-known Porzione
Massiccia Crew, lead by the
virtuosic MC Inoki, who would go on to work as a successful solo artist.
Their early track ‘Business su Business’ [Business on Business] is a dark
portrait of 90s Italy, corrupt, profoundly unequal and yet happily
anaesthetized by consumerism:

While Fight da faida aims straight for the
jugular with its moralistic energy, this track has a slower and more lurid feel,
offering a carnivalesque parody of what was actually going on behind the glass
doors of the Borsa Italiana. The chorus is profoundly physical, joking about
the “monetary fitness” of Milan’s “muscular” banking class. The swagger is reflected
in the MCs’ own investment within the “grand lottery”: “give me freedom, aka
cash”. It is a working class worldview that is constantly presented as a
reflection of higher powers: “money, that’s the key to this planetary
movement”. Through this wider frame the track places the (apparently) universal
desire to make money in direct conflict with
the limits placed on this by class and racial structures.

Social
centres and urban activism

One of the most interesting political characteristics
ofItalian hip-hop, however, is its considerable
overlap with political street movements and urban activism. This is most
visible in the group of artists who were born from a loose movement of social centres
and squats across the country. This scene emerged in the late 1980s following the
fragmentation and arrest of the autonomisti
in 1978 and it was this legacy - the sense of being robbed of a future - which
provided such a fertile breeding ground for new forms of avant-garde. These groups
are more explicitly ideological that those working outside of the centri
sociali and their music tends to be characterised by explicit references to
anarcho-communist philosophy (well to the left of the realities being offered
by political parties).

Of the early artists, perhaps the most
important was Sangue
Misto, a Neapolitan-Sardinian outfit who pushed African and black American
influences to the front of the tracks. In some Italian record stores, their one
and only album is even categorized as ‘world music’. Like many crews their lyrics
are focused issues about race and discrimination, though unlike the Porzione
Massiccia Crew, their work begins from biography and ends with a serious
intervention in the space of European high culture.

This track ‘Lo straniero’ [the stranger] is
a deliberate nod to the life and legacy of Albert Camus - an Algerian writing in
France. The citation, though, does not serve to sanitise the track (as a mere retreat into the world of letters) but
frames an angry, biographical reflection on being humiliated in literature
class: “When I went to school as a kid / the others would call me ‘marocchino’
/ person of the mud! Shut up and go back to where you came from! / This is the
first thing I learnt in absolute”. The MC, reflecting on the scene as the basis
of his “real education”, repeats the simple but brutal chorus: “no
no no! I’m a foreigner in my own nation”.

Similar musical influences are present in the
music of the 99posse, though here the specific issues of racism and
xenophobia are integrated into a partisan aesthetic - of black and red stars - which is explicitly propagandistic in its
call for systemic political change. The Posse remain one of Italy’s most
successful hip-hop groups and they are recognized as pioneers of ‘fusion-rap’,
bringing Neapolitan folk music into collision with reggae and British rave. The
group came to fame in the 1990s in tandem with the alter-globalisation
movement, and tracks such as Curre curre guaglió remain some of the most important artifacts of this era:

This bagpipe-led battle hymn is an
unambiguous call to arms and casts a dark shadow on the Occupy period as imagined
by many in the liberal media (white, middle-class tent cities and harmless bongo
circles). Many Anglophone journalists have puzzled as to why Italy had no Syntagma
Square or Puerta del Sol in 2011 and this track is itself an answer: the
activist imagination is too militant here, and the thick network of smaller social
centres has established a different and more consistently antagonistic
relationship with the state than any other European country. While the political efficacy of these spaces
is a topic of considerable debate, this song revels in the extremes of its
utopian imagination: “If the wind howls against us, I shout at the wind/ we’re
knocking on parliament, with a rage inside that’s on display and now… Rome is
ours”.

The
southern ‘problem’

While the Italian hip-hop scene has seemingly
been dominated by venues and labels in the Northern cities, the poor southern
regions of Puglia, Calabria, Campagna and Sicily have long been present in both
the background of the stars and the subject matter of the lyrics. Sud
Sound System were among the first voices in Italian rap, and tracks such as ‘Fuecu/
T’a sciuta bona’ and ‘Turcinieddhri’
were important in publically challenging the forced migration that
characterized the experience of the post-war generation.

The scale of the problem facing Italy’s
southern regions remains disproportionately grave today: Naples and Palermo are
among the most impoverished metropolitan spaces in Europe and the unemployment
rate in these two cities is almost double that of the entirety of the north. The
Sicilian duo Stokka
and Madbunny, in particular, have been pioneers in the musical response to
this, drawing heavily on the popular fear of rioting and political terrorism as
a means of ramming home the implications of this poverty for young people:

They rap as one, riffing on the
government’s anti-corruption programme mani
pulite [clean hands]: “The ‘respectability’ of this government makes me
sick, it has darker hands than mine! Black… like hell”. The chorus recalls the rage
of Assalti Frontali, taking it further, to the point of actively inciting
violence: All the kids in the street,
rock on! The linea, the armed struggle – rock on / raise the flag”. Over the
past decade the group have galvanised considerable moral panic among Palermo’s
conservative society. Anticipating this
reaction, and confronting it head-on, Stokka saves a combative line for his
critics: “you don’t get what this track is about […] and it won’t stop your
blackmail”.

In the mainstream, the South has been
recently ‘reinvented’ in the popular imagination, and one of the biggest successes
of recent years, and perhaps the most enigmatic rapper in Italy today is the
Puglian lyricist Caparezza. His music is pompous and experimental, fuelled
by a devious Eminem-like humour and exaggerated Balkan beats. In the video to
track ‘Vieni a ballare in Puglia’ [come and dance in Puglia] the rapper dresses
up as a tourguide and directs a group of foreign tourists around a nightmare
version of the region where dancing girls are hidden behind Venetian masks and
chefs tied-up in puppet strings:

Here his ironic bombast is deployed against
the stereotype of his home region as a paradise of sand and sun: “It’s true
that here we make good parties, but the people are depressed and fleeing […]
come and dance in our tomato fields where the mafia enslave their workers and
Romanians in crammed-up and peeled in jars”.
At the end of the video the tourists, led by their devious guide, come
across the population of a village dead in the square. As the final chorus
begins the Puglian people return to life as zombies and charge at the onlookers:
“come and dance in Puglia, Puglia, Puglia, it tremble like a leaf, leaf leaf.
Keep your head high when passing the cranes - sometimes they come loose and can
fall down”.

Conclusion

Young Italians are
leaving the country in record numbers, to Berlin, to London and South
America. For those who remain, though, hip-hop remains one of the most
important cultural forms through which to express anger at a corrupt elite and articulate
dreams for different ways of living.

Last month was the Sanremo music
festival, one of the most important moments in Italy’s musical calendar. It
was met with the usual boos and the commentariat took no time at all to raise the
national lament. “Why do Italians
understand so little about music?” ran the
hyperbolic VICE headline. Yet while the critics despaired rappers and
groups across the country - Murubutu, K Maiuscola, Inversi -were continuing to work beneath the radar of the
industry and without the support of journalists.

At this underground level Italian hip-hop remains
as potent today as it was in the ‘golden age’, led by passionate devotees who continue
to shape the sounds of this tradition by appeal to dialect and local anecdote. At
the heart of this is language itself, in this case, sharp, angry and at times,
poetic. In her book Close to the Edge
Sujatha Fernandes describes rap as the “arsenal, repertoire and landscape of
urban youth” and it is indeed among this demographic – barely represented in
the corridors of power – that the form remains important. While the possibility
of this mobilizing globally (as many utopian thinkers suggested in the 90s) now
seems a pipedream, its importance in Italy should not be underestimated. For some,
rap is part of a movement for social justice, for others it is the only way out
of hell.

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